


perchance to dream

by galateaGalvanized



Series: Paradise Found [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, F/F, Fix-It, M/M, Starscream is waiting for a train; no not that train, The Transformers: Till All Are One (IDW)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24131722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galateaGalvanized/pseuds/galateaGalvanized
Summary: Trapped in the twin cages of jail and the limbo of infraspace, Starscream and Bumblebee descend into Starscream's subconscious to escape. In their perfect dream, they are married and co-ruling Cybertron... but in the real world, Starscream's spark starts slowly going out. Windblade patches herself into Starscream's mind, desperate to save Starscream from himself--and maybe from something else entirely.
Relationships: Bumblebee/Starscream (Transformers), Chromia/Windblade
Series: Paradise Found [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1814740
Comments: 18
Kudos: 70





	perchance to dream

**Author's Note:**

> This is an incredibly self-indulgent fic with all of my favorite things: Inception-esque traveling through dreams, a masquerade, and emotional confessions on balconies. 
> 
> It's set after Till All Are One (TAAO), so be warned that there are spoilers for that story. I've tried to include as few spoilers and unexplained references as possible, though, so please don't let that scare you off. For now, enjoy!

Windblade knows this city. No, that is not correct—she knows the bones of this city, the sweep of the arches, the clusters and skybridges that edge towards the horizon. What she does not know, but what she recognizes, is the despair and decay that permeates every inch of this ruined Cybertron. Each of the buildings are the dull black of graphite and just as brittle, some pieces already spirited away on a cold wind. Every corner of this city seems stark and alien, even the pieces she knows like the back of her hand: the main garden of Iacon Plaza, overgrown; Bismuth’s Bodyworks, bricked up; Maccadam’s Old Oil House, shuttered. Throughout her history in speaking with cities, Windblade has never felt so inarticulate.

She reaches down to the gravel beneath her feet, scraping a few fingers through the fragile remains of the road. She does not know how she’ll ever find Starscream in this prison. The clearing around her gives her plenty of space for a vertical take-off, and the few remaining edifices beneath her crumple to dust beneath her turbines. Winging between dilapidated buildings reminds her of the last time she was fighting in a mindscape, and how the battle had torn bits and pieces from both her buildings and her mind.

This, though. This is ruin. Glancing down, she revises her earlier thoughts. This is not a prison; this is a _grave_. She can only hope that Starscream is not down there, somewhere, buried beneath the rubble and letting his ashes mix with the dust.

The roads are cracked and tarnished ribbons that stretch themselves out beneath her. From the air, she can see what she could not see below: even braiding and unbraiding as they are, the roads all stretch towards the same, single destination. A tall black tower pierces the sky in the distance, a jagged tear on the horizon. Iacon Tower.

Windblade follows the roads until she finds herself on level with the vast circle of the Iacon Timekeeper. The clock face, usually golden and glowing with the thirteen original Primes ringing a matrix motif, is missing the hour and minute hands. The seconds still tick by, speeding up and slowing down, and the delicate scrolling on the hand catches on a fallen balustrade leaning precariously close to the portrait of Solus Prime. As she looks closer, Windblade notices with a chill of fear that each of the portraits have had its eyes gouged out. The matrix motif is cracked and broken, its two halves riddled with broken interior lights.

She steels herself. Haunting though this is, it is still Starscream’s mind. And, no matter how else he has changed, Starscream is still going to put himself on top.

Windblade alights on the landing space to the right of the clock. Smooth crystalline stairs spiral upwards, wrapping up and around the back of the tower like an ore vein bursting through the stone. She steps lightly, feet barely tapping the crystal, withsomething instinctual warning her against waking what dark hunger is slumbering in the heart of the city. 

At the top of the tower, she finds something else slumbering instead. Starscream looks similar enough in the dream as he did in Fixit’s clinic, his arms straight at his side and profile pointing perfectly upwards, wings spread wide across the recharge slab. Seeing Starscream there, then, had been the first time that Windblade had seen him since they had completed the power transition. She draws closer and remembers asking Fixit how long he had been out. Remembers Fixit shifting his weight from one leg to the other, unable to look her in the eyes.

“42 days,” he had said, voice soft and low. “I thought it was a form of soft termination, at first, but then—I saw his eyes.”

The Starscream lying prone at the top of Iacon Tower has the same problem: his eyes glow a dim purple barely visible in the low light. A rich, royal purple. The same purple as _Vigilem’s_ eyes had been.

Starscream’s the only unscarred, unbroken thing in the entirety of the city, but there is a thin layer of dust accumulating in a smooth, even coat across every inch of his paint. Windblade sits at his side, brushing away some of the dust with furious swipes of her hand. He is so still; he looks like a princess in the old Earth stories, slumbering at the top of his magical tower and waiting for a prince to come kiss him out of it.

Windblade sighs and lays down next to him. There is a cortical psychic patch cable next to this recharge slab, shining and new, as if recently spun into existence and waiting for her. She grabs it and reaches over to do something far more invasive than steal a kiss. 

She offlines her optics to the soft _snik_ of the cable sinking home.

\-----

The world spirals away from her, muffling the draw of that hungry, unknowing thing. 

She wakes up with the bitter taste of ash in her mouth and sunlight pouring in through the windows, supernova bright after the dark night. Windblade wipes lubricant from her eyes, fingers coming away slick. 

The room around her has more life in two thousand square meters than the entirety of the previous dream. Yellow datapads are strewn across every flat surface, some in precarious piles and some scattered in the shadow of toppled stacks. There are knick-knacks, too, little geodes and model ships, and pictures are hanging on every wall. There is even a half-complete match of Tarnaxian chess sprawled across one of the tables. Windblade feet slide across the top of the bed as she swings them over the side, and she notices thousands of well-worn scrapes along the metal edge. The tracks run down both sides.

She rubs her fingers over the scratches, spark pulsing. At first, she had assumed that this was what Starscream's quarters had looked like while he had ruled Cybertron, but. Who else was there? Or had Vigilem followed Starscream further into his subconscious, and constructed something—someone—to better convince Starscream into relinquishing control of his body? She looks around the room again, trying to spot the teeth of the trap.

Through the balcony doors, the sun is setting over a new Cybertron, glistening and golden. It is arresting; her head feels full of static charge to see it. When she had dreamt of Cybertron, when she was lonely and alone on a dying planet and imagining a savior, she had dreamt of this. She had dreamt of gold and gleaming buildings curving towards the sky, deft spirals and arches weaving a canopy of steel for a thriving metropolis. The city below pulses with movement, clamor, routine chaos. It is everything; it is hope alive. 

These days, she limits herself to dreaming of a Cybertron with consistent powerflows and unrationed energon. She had lost sight of dreaming this big.

She staggers back into the bedroom, one of her heels sending cracks across an errant yellow data pad. The room continues to have nothing that she would expect. There is a metallic sculpture that reminds her of the flora on Earth but made of twisting copper wires and hoops holding delicate petals of clear mica sheets. One of the hoops is missing its crystal, a remnant of careless fingers, and Windblade reaches out to hold it. Did Starscream bring this? Or… Starscream’s guest?

On the same table, she catches sight of an array of flat pieces of elaborately decorated metal plates. Windblade bends to pick one up, marvelling at the details in its construction. Colored glass and metal beads have been interwoven in spiraling geometric patterns to create the appearance of fangs curled into a wide grin. Her fingers find magnets along the sides, hidden by tight clusters of gold and ruby glass. As she looks around, she spies others, nestled between datapads, with different designs: raised lines of blue and silver overlapping into sets of wings; deep red and purple gems spun into a galaxy; and, off in the far corner, gold and black lines forming a honeycomb, with little metal bumblebee figurines dotted along the intersections. 

She walks over to that one, and as she bends to pick it up, she finds herself at eye level with a framed photo that confirms all her suspicions. Her thoughts linger on the genuine smile on Starscream’s face, and how the softness of his grin outshines its smugness. The way the sun catches on his wings and on his hand at Bumblebee’s waist. Bumblebee himself, smiling, shy but sure, blue optics so bright they are spilling light across the ridges of his cheeks. Here is the truth of Starscream’s dream and the teeth of Vigilem’s trap: a golden, living Cybertron, and a golden, living Bumblebee.

_Art commissioned from @ErikaGSkerzz on[Twitter](https://twitter.com/ErikaGSkerzz/status/1203321988992978944?s=20) and on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/ErikaSkerzz/posts). Posted here with permission._

She is so caught up on the details of the photograph that she almost misses the note tucked in the corner, a little hand-scribed thing on cheap sheet foil. "May yours be the peace of the Acid Wastes after a storm, and may that peace last infinitely longer than your war. Love, Windblade.”

She chokes, fingers on her own handwriting. She cannot help but fear, suddenly, being caught in this room where she’s clearly an interloper, an unwanted version of herself that doesn’t belong. The open balcony beckons, curtains wafting gently in a warm breeze. 

The mask she was holding drops from her fingers, clinking softly on the floor, as she walks towards the open doors. The entirety of New Iacon is sprawled like a sea of glittering gems below her, every bit as beautiful and intricate as the face plates behind her. In the distance, she can see the fires of Kaon, freshly lit, and construction on a new interstate that looks like it will reach all the way to Vos. Her spark clenches with a mess of emotions, crowned with a desperate grief over what Cybertron had lost and a need to build this, exactly this, for the people in her world. She owes it to all of them.

Closer in, she spies a crowd of Cybertronians—hundreds of them, multi-colored and multi-badged—streaming into the front gates of the capitol building. If Starscream—or Vigilem—will be found anywhere, she is sure it will be at the center of all that attention. She takes a step back, two, then makes a running leap for the star-speckled sky, transforming into a jet on the way down. There is a bit of open space in the entryway courtyard in which she lands.

The people around her are surprisingly realistic, for dream simulations. They snap at her when she tries to cut in line, jostle and try to peer over her towards the door. Well, Starscream’s mind always was an expert in how people act when they want something.

She goes with the flow of the crowd, dodging elbows and pulling her wings in tight as they move, slowly but surely, into the grand entrance hall of Iacon Tower. She has never seen the room, let alone the building, with so many Cybertronians in it at once. 

The wild, eager chaos is like steel wool across her nerves. When someone reaches out of the wall of bodies to grab her hand, Windblade almost takes their head off.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” she hears, and she turns.

“Windblade,” Chromia says, laughing, her blue and silver as bright as her smile. Windblade hasn’t seen Chromia look so... so _well-rested_ since their academy days on Caminus. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, what were you—oof!”

WIndblade wraps her arms tighter around her dearest friend, breathing in the familiar smell of her, all the warmth and angles that she knows and loves so well. It had been so painful, holding the highest Cybertronian political office and still unable to bring Chromia back home. It would have been an unconscionable abuse of power, using her new seat to halt Chromia’s journey search for—

Windblade stiffens, suddenly. For Vigilem, of course. Is this a warning? Or an extension of the trap? She takes a step away. Her face is a mess of odd shapes, repressing both a smile and a shiver of fear. This is _not Chromia_ , but. _But_.

Something glitters in Chromia’s hands. It is easier to look at than her face, as soft and fond as summer sunlight. “You can’t have missed me that much since this morning,” Chromia chides gently. “Look, you forgot your mask on the kitchen counter when you flew out, so I brought it for you.”

Chromia hands Windblade a faceplate as she puts her own up to her mouth. Chromia’s has two porcelain fingers placed over false lips, as if keeping a secret or blowing a kiss. The one in Windblade’s hands is more stylized, with a maze of textures adding near-impossible depth. The bulk of it is made of concentric squares of bismuth that had been painstakingly shaped into a forge. At the center is an anvil, also built out of the oil slick-colored metal, and atop that is a single opalescent blue pearl. She runs her fingers over it, trying not to cry. It is beautiful. It must have been a _bitch_ to craft.

Chromia’s eyes are questioning, and Windblade does not want to draw any more attention to herself than necessary. She clicks the mask into place, and when Chromia holds out her hand, Windblade takes it.

As they wind their way through the crowd, their hands linking them together like the lines of a constellation, Windblade asks, “Why the faceplates? It’s not like we can hide our identities with them.”

“It’s an Earth thing, apparently. Bumblebee happened across one, when he was still the Cybertronian ambassador to Earth. The Earthlings—”

“Humans.”

“—humans,” Chromia parrots with a roll of her eyes, “use it as an opportunity to dress up and do things they normally wouldn’t. Bee mentioned it to Starscream _once_ , and, well. You know Starscream.”

Windblade, apparently, does not know Starscream. She thought he hated Earth culture. “He’ll do anything for Bumblebee?” she guesses, but Chromia just laughs.

“I meant that he’ll take any excuse to throw a huge party with tons of ridiculous fanfare,” she says over her shoulder, having to shout over the din of conversation, “but sure, that too. Especially now.”

Especially now, when Starscream’s living out the rest of his shortening lifespan in a perfect dream. 

Despite this thought, knowing that there’s iron beneath the gold gilding of this cage, Windblade cannot pull away when Chromia links their arms. They glide through the crowd together, easily sidestepping revelers, and move inexorably towards the center of the room. The floor has been tiered like a huge cake, each level more intricately decorated than the last, and it is with wistful determination that Windblade does not stop to admire the careful scrollwork on the stairs, the flutter of white sashes in some artificial breeze.

At the highest tier, it is impossible to miss Starscream holding court. He is in full regalia, his sweeping red cloak descending in riotous waves over the top of his wings, golden crown perched perfectly on his brow. He looks like a figure taken from the old archives beneath Kalis, from the ancient Golden Age scrolls depicting the glorious reign of the Thirteen Primes. Next to him, just as exasperated and fond and alive as he was in the photo, is Bumblebee. He is looking up at Starscream with a long-suffering twist to his smile, but he looks like his chassis is too small to hold all the pride he feels, to keep it from spilling up and over his sides. Starscream, of course, is in his element, gesturing expansively and keeping up a steady stream of chatter, but he keeps darting glances towards Bumblebee to see if he is still watching, still smiling. He always is.

After one of those glances, Windblade can see that this Starscream’s eyes are red, red, red.

Windblade takes a deep breath to steady herself and dumps the emotional subroutines tying up her processor, leaving her with a painful brand of clarity. In the stillness that follows, she remembers Fixit, his hands steady as he unspooled the cortical psychic patch next to Starscream’s circuit bed. His voice was not as steady as his hands.

“Here’s the thing, First Delegate,” he had warned. “We’d thought Starscream had soft terminated, but when we opened his spark chamber, he hadn’t shut down his spark at all. Quite the opposite. His mind isn’t in stasis due to lack of spark energy in his body; his _body_ is in stasis to support the energy demand of _two minds_."

 _Vigilem_ , she had thought, and seen confirmation reflected in Fixit’s visor.

“We have to stop him,” Windblade had said, reckless with certainty and desperate with guilt. “I have to go in.”

In front of her, now, Starscream’s laugh echoes through the grand hall, a well-practiced and polished laugh with a raw thread of honest joy. Windblade goes in.

“Windblade! Chromia! You made it,” Starscream demurs when he catches sight of them.

At his right, Bumblebee nudges his arm with a shoulder. "As if you didn't make it mandatory for any ‘Council and Council-Adjacent members’ to attend.”

Starscream looks at Windblade, knowing. She wonders if her counterpart in this world is kinder, or more accommodating. If she is less inclined to open rebellion. "Well, you'll admit that these two don’t exactly have an _exemplary_ track record with my _other_ orders,” Starscream says, dispelling that notion.

Before Windblade can wonder how elections played out in the world, Chromia steps forward to hug Bumblebee and nod, with just the barest sliver of respect, at Starscream. “We don’t have to rehash history tonight,” she says. “This is about the future, so please accept my best wishes for yours.”

Bumblebee smiles again, genuinely, his eyes little half-moons of happiness. “Thank you, Chromia.” Even Starscream looks grudgingly grateful for the kindness, though Bumblebee elbows him again before he can open his mouth to ruin it.

“Hey, you two, where are your masks?” Chromia asks. 

"You'd have me cover any of _this_ up?" Starscream gestures expansively to himself, and Bumblebee coughs, biolights running a brighter blue in embarrassment.

"Well, they sort of, uh, get in the way," Bumblebee says, and Windblade cannot help but laugh. Bumblebee and Starscream sheepishly pull faceplates from subspace, and Windblade thinks they've accidentally swapped masks until they both reach up to click them into place. Bumblebee's has an elaborate diorama of Cybertron in miniature, sculpted to match the view she had seen from their balcony only an hour before. Starscream's—well. Her spark clenches to see that Starscream's is just a single, undecorated plate of goldenrod yellow.

“ _Attention! Can I have your attention, please,_ ” a voice that sounds suspiciously like Blurr’s echoes over the loudspeaker. _“Tonight’s dancing is about to begin. Will the new conjunxes please come to the dancefloor?_ ”

“Guess that’s our cue,” Starscream says, holding out an arm for Bumblebee. A simple white cane is leaning against the railing behind them, and Bumblebee takes the cane in one hand and Starscream’s arm in the other. They descend the stairs to the rapidly clearing dancefloor with casual grace, as slow and unhurried as they had rarely been in life.

“ _Blurr_ is the emcee?” Windblade asks, because ‘They’re married?’ is too big of a question. The words do not fit in her mouth, too sharp-edged and huge.

Chromia moves to the railing, looking down and out over the crowd. Her body looks relaxed, but Windblade can see her eyes marking the exits and blindspots in the room.

“Well, he still hates Starscream. And who doesn’t, at least a little? But it’s hard to hate Bee, and that’s who he’s here for,” Chromia says, and she smiles. “Who a lot of us are here for.”

Windblade joins her at the railing, their arms brushing. Her arrival on Cybertron came almost immediately after Bumblebee was killed, so she had never met the real bot. She had heard stories, of course: found pieces of him everywhere, scattered like fallen fragments of a comet burnt up in the atmosphere. She had not been sure how true any of it was; no one wants to speak ill of the dead, and everyone wants to speak well of a martyr. But still, some things were consistent enough in the stories to be true. Bumblebee must have been something else entirely, to have left such a mark on Starscream’s conscience as to cause Starscream to hallucinate him. On the dancefloor, the two bots in question spin around the dancefloor in a simple box step waltz, Starscream’s cape flaring out dramatically behind him while Bumblebee laughs. Most of Cybertron looks on, glassy-eyed and tipsy, before they, too, start to join in.

Something else, indeed.

Chromia stretches her arms out and rolls her head from side to side, a question and a challenge on her face as she smirks. “Care to dance, Madame Ambassador?”

Windblade should be looking for Vigilem. She should be knocking at the walls of this beautiful cage, looking for holes and ways to pull Starscream out without giving Vigilem more of a foothold. She should— she should—

She takes Chromia’s hand.

There are bots of every color and alt mode spinning around the dancefloor with varying amounts of skill. Chromia draws her through them, stepping deftly around wheels and wings alike, and they draw to a halt close to the outer edge of the crowd. With one hand at Windblade’s hip and another holding her hand with the same gentle care as she might cup a protoform, Chromia begins to lead.

“You could stay,” Chromia says on their fourth pass around the floor. Windblade tenses in her arms, and Chromia has to tug slightly to keep them moving. “I meant, on Cybertron, instead of going back to Caminus next week. Bumblebee passed on his ambassador duties ages ago to focus on building out Kaon, and I— _we_ need you here.”

It’s a siren song; it’s a temptation as poisonous as time travel, to go back and change the world into something beautiful and perfect instead of a bleeding, broken thing. Chromia is looking at her with such hopeful eyes even as she dares not say more, as if she has had to crack open her chassis to makes this single request. Windblade must call on every inch of her faith to remember that there is no worth in a lie. Her hand grips Chromia’s tighter for an instant, and she thinks: not even this one.

“I’ll think about it,” Windblade says, and she lets their hands fall apart. “Give me some time.”

Chromia nods even as she steps away, respect and understanding not quite masking the hurt. “Take all the time you need.”

The air on the balcony is cool and crisp, a welcome relief to her overheating processor. She can almost start to think again, staring out at the vast sea of lights and skyscrapers rising like a welcome tide before her. Contrails trace draw constellations in the night overseen by Luna 1 and 2, and even the air seems to sing _alive_ , _alive_.

She disengages her faceplate with a click and holds it in her hands. Rubbing a finger over the blue pearl makes it shine a little brighter, and she wonders absently if it houses a little a spark of an LED. Somewhere in Starscream’s mind, he clearly remembered their battle with Vigilem well enough to make this mask for her. _Somewhere_ , he remembers, and he is thinking about it.

She reaches out with her Cityspeaker instincts, trying to read the dream as she would any Cybertronian city. Vigilem may have been stronger, faster, and better at reading her when they had fought in Windblade’s mind—but she had gotten a sense of him as well. Even in the vast sprawl of the city before her, she can’t feel a single hint of that familiar savagery: just an overwhelming feeling of joy, and, very faintly, one of despair.

A gentle knock on the balcony railing brings her out of her reverie.

“Sorry to disturb you, Windblade,” Bumblebee says, and she turns in shock to face him. Up close, she can see the lines of wear on his face, the slight tension in his shoulders that probably never goes away. Even with that, though, he is relaxed in a way that makes him look much younger than he’d seemed in the holovids displayed at his funeral: a mech that was struggling to hold the sharp, fragmented pieces of both his homeworld and his beliefs together. He is still wearing his mask.

“Oh, Bumblebee,” she says, suddenly aware of just how little she knows about him beyond the stories and vids. She wonders how closely this facsimile matches the real thing. “I meant to say—congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Bumblebee says, automatic and for what must be the thousandth time today, before he laughs self-deprecatingly. It comes out a little muffled, and he rolls his eyes before removing his faceplate. “No, really, thank you. It’s, ah. It’s the best day of my life, actually.”

“And Starscream? He seems...” Windblade wants to say _happy_ , but that doesn’t seem right.

“Like a right pain in my gear shaft? Well, he wouldn’t be Starscream if he weren’t.” Either Starscream’s subconscious could not lie well enough to make a Bumblebee that would fawn over him, or Starscream’s type is someone who is mean to him.

“You two aren’t exactly what I was expecting,” Windblade says, trying not to be too suspicious. “I missed most of your, ah, tenure.”

“You don’t have to be polite, Windblade,” Bumblebee says wryly. He plants one elbow on the railing as he grins at her, splitting his weight between his cane and the rail. The city lights beneath him twinkle like LEDs on a massive motherboard. “I _was_ bad at making decisions.

“And now?”

“Well, I’m good at stopping Starscream from making worse ones.” Bumblebee gestures out at the living, whirring city beneath them, fliers and four-wheelers alike cutting brief flashing swathes in the dark. “People never trusted my decisions, but at least they trusted my motives. _Starscream_ , well. Everyone knows he’s a brilliant strategist, but no one would trust him to tell them their own name.”

Bumblebee lifts his mask up on level with the city spread out beneath them, both images of Cybertron beautiful in different ways. Windblade thinks that the masks do even less than a token attempt at masking their identities; with these masks, the true nature of each person’s spark is on display for all to see.

“There was a lot of doubt, too,” he continues. “The number of times Prowl searched me for one of Bombshell’s mind control bugs… Well, no one could believe a joint Autobot/Decepticon command hierarchy could ever function. Could even be real.”

“Then you got hitched, and people had to believe,” Windblade fills in for him, grinning.

Bumblebee coughs in embarrassment, blue eyes brightening. “Yes, well. It wasn’t just for the political benefits.”

“No, no, I can see that.” Windblade stares out over the city, stretching the limits of her powers to catch even the slightest hint of Vigilem’s malice. She is here for a reason, and the reason isn’t to befriend a long-dead Autobot. She needs a hint, a whisper, anything to show her where the pressure point is in this trap. Fixit had warned that breaking the dream too quickly might break Starscream, so she can barely rush into the wedding hall like a modern-day Cassandra. 

“Credit for your thoughts?” Bumblebee asks, breaking her train of thought. He looks patient, contemplative, and it gives her an idea. Maybe she can bend the dream just enough to see the cracks.

“Just thinking about how far we’ve come,” she says, gesturing to the city, to his mask. “It seems almost impossible.” It is true; it has never been truer, with the false Cybertron spread before her, glittering like fool’s gold.

“You’re telling me! Four million years of war, and we finally have peace. Real, lasting peace. Cybertron alive and well, cultivating hot spots on Luna 2, myself, uh—”

“Conjunxed,” Windblade supplies, and Bumblebee laughs. She must remind herself twice that he isn’t real, that the loss of him in this dream would just be more slag burned away to bring Starscream out of danger. “I’m sad to have missed out on so much history, but I’m glad to have missed the war. The bit I did see—of Shockwave—was bad enough.”

The name hangs in the air, shimmering like the sound of a crystal glass struck with a too-forceful blow. The ripples of it echo into the city itself, which seems to quiet.

Windblade presses on, body as taut and well-aimed as a bow. “I couldn’t believe you’d survived, honestly, when we met.”

“Oh, yeah, we’ve all had so many close calls. And I must have been in bad shape, after. I can barely remember.” He seems at peace with the violence of his old life, as if it were a monster in the closet that had faded away in the sparkling dawn light.

“How _did_ you survive Shockwave’s blast, Bumblebee?” she asks. If she is right, Starscream will have built a history for him that cannot possibly match the facts. The cognitive dissonance between Bumblebee—alive—and what Starscream knows somewhere, like he knew enough to make her mask, might give her an in.

“I was with Megatron,” Bumblebee says slowly, as if walking himself back through the memory. That is well-known: in every story, he is the reason Megatron changed sides. “Optimus was on his way. What did I…? Shockwave came, and he pulled up his plasma cannon, and I— oh. I died.”

Bumblebee opens his mouth, optics wide, his body locked in place. His hand with the mask in it moves to cover his midriff, and Windblade sees him flicker between pure goldenrod yellow and a mix of gold and blue. Those were the colors he died in, according to Optimus, but how by Primus could _Starscream_ have known that? Bumblebee had changed bodies mere hours before the final confrontation.

After an interminable minute, Bumblebee’s eyes refocus on her, and his colors resolidify into his usual cheerful yellow. His mouth hardens into a stern line. “Starscream,” he says quietly, a revelation. “ _Damn it_.”

He turns, leaning on his cane to do so, and throws an accusation into the shadowed recess by the balcony doors. “Did you know?”

Shadows peel away from Starscream’s familiar red and white wings as he steps forward, mouth twisted in frustration over being caught. 

“That the real Windblade was here?” Starscream glares at her, arms crossed, as he stalks up to them. “No, or I would’ve kicked her right out.”

It’s—well, if she’s honest, it’s a very relievingly _Starscream_ thing to do.

“That there was a _fake_ Windblade here in the first place!” Bumblebee shouts. He takes a deep breath and lets it all out through his exhaust vents, a rush of hot air moving past them. “Starscream,” he continues, calmer. “Why did I forget this was a dream, and you didn’t?”

Starscream huffs. “ _Apparently_ , as good of a liar as I am, I still can’t manage to lie to myself.” He looks away, back to the party, to the closed doors muffling whatever synthpop Blurr is blasting out of the bass. “Even when I want to.” 

He looks back at Windblade, and his eyes are as accusing as they ever were. “Well? Did you get what you wanted? Lifetime imprisonment was not enough, huh. Are you here to make sure I’m _suffering sufficiently_ for my sins?”

“I’m here to make sure you don’t die,” Windblade snaps, wrong-footed, and as she looks at Starscream standing with his arms crossed and his spark in his throat, she’s beginning to think she’s missed something. “You’ve been in stasis lock for 42 days. I thought _Vigilem_ was back.”

“ _Vigilem_? Making up _ghosts_ for an excuse to corner me in my own brain—” 

“Your eyes were purple!” Windblade’s voice cracks as she shouts. “Fixit’s technometric scanner was showing two minds starving your body of sparkflow. Who _else—_ ” Windblade starts to ask, and when Starscream and Bumblebee look at each other warily, she stops.

“You’re the real Bumblebee,” she marvels, and a million little puzzle pieces of history rotate themselves in her brain, fitting together to form a new and different picture. All those times she heard Starscream talking to himself, how he knew things he could not possibly know, his many changes of heart. Bumblebee and Starscream stare at her in mirrored shock, red eyes and blue eyes shining bright. Red, and blue, making purple.

Bumblebee—the _real_ Bumblebee, Optimus’ lieutenant, who sacrificed his life and brought over to the Autobots—turns on his heel and jabs a finger into Starscream’s chest. “How come _she_ figures it out in an hour, but _you_ can’t admit I’m not a hallucination until I come into your own _brain_.”

Starscream coughs and looks, long-suffering, at the sky. It is an expression that is typically better suited to anyone dealing with Starscream more than Starscream himself. The gold of his faceplate glints in the moonlight. “Well,” he hedges, “until you were in my brain, and you still wouldn’t—”

“Starscream!” Bumblebee cuts him off, rolling his eyes, before looking back at Windblade, his eyes intent. “Wait, Windblade, what did you say before? About sparkflow?”

Still marveling at how drastically she had missed the mark of the situation, Windblade sketches it out for them: Starscream’s dwindling power output, the weakening connection between his spark and his brain, the scant months Fixit predicted he had left to live. That Fixit had thought it was on purpose, at first. That she understands, with a gesture to the world around them, why Starscream might want to stay.

“No way,” Bumblebee says quietly when she finishes. His hands are curled into fists, and there’s steel in his voice and silicon carbide in his spine. “I’m not staying here if it’s killing Starscream.”

Starscream shoots him a quick look. Inside Iacon Tower, the beat drops for a particularly percussive EDM song, and the windows bow outwards slightly with the noise. Windblade takes a breath. “I don’t think your being here is what’s killing Starscream,” she says, spark beating as fast as the music pulsing through the balcony floor. “It’s just killing him faster. If he stays here, living in this dream, his spark will give out sooner or later. It wasn’t—uncommon, during the war. It’s why Fixit called me in, and why Ironhide let me go. We thought Vigilem was just waiting you out.”

“So our options are staying here and dying quick, or going back to my cell and dying slow?” Starscream scoffs, pacing with anxious energy to the balcony railing and back. With a sigh, he removes his faceplate, thumb skating across the yellow metal with a sigh. “I had four million years of dying slow, thanks. I know what living is, and what living isn’t.” 

Bumblebee’s eyes follow Starscream as he turns away from them, sad but unsurprised. She thinks he wears the look of a martyr well. Desperately, Windblade searches her memories for some reason she could give him to live.

“Starscream,” she says, slowly feeling out the shape of a thought. “What if we could transfer Bumblebee’s consciousness to a new body? If Vigilem could travel from my brain to yours, and if Bumblebee is _here_ , really here, with you…”

The thought sinks in slowly, taking shape in Starscream’s raised shoulders, his wings vibrating like the string of a bow. “Then _get him out_ ,” he spits to the side, the words tearing themselves through his vocalizer and emerging blood-flecked and raw in the cold night air. His grip on the golden mask in his hand tightens until cracks appear in stripes across the metal. “Save him, but leave me be.”

Bumblebee’s spine straightens again, that silicon carbide turning to diamond strength in his eyes. “I’m not going.”

Starscream whirls on him. “But—”

“But _nothing_ ,” Bumblebee says, furious, and Windblade feels once again like an interloper in their space. “You heard my vows today, when I swore I’d never leave you. Whatever else anyone says about me, I keep my promises.”

Starscream exhales, his fans kicking into high gear. He leans against the balcony, tipping forward over the rail as he tries to cool down. “Bee, I won’t fuck up _your_ life. Not if Windblade thinks this is an actual chance to get your real one back.” When he turns back around, Windblade can see the faint smudge of lubricant running across his face. It hurts, still, somehow, to see him losing the control he loved so dear. “This isn’t fair. You’re asking me to give up everything I’ve ever wanted—all the things I didn’t know I wanted, but needed—just to sit in a jail and rot?”

Bumblebee steps forward, just a few feet, and opens his hands. He drops his mask, this tangible reminder of their shared dream, and it clatters to the concrete with a sound like a breaking windshield. The fissures in the cracked gold metal in Starscream’s hand widen. “I’m not asking you to do anything, Starscream. I’m just asking that, whatever you do, you do it with me.”

“If you mean this,” Starscream says, his voice going low and intent, and Windblade must manually stop her combat protocols from activating. Nothing good ever happens when Starscream sounds like that. “If you’re not doing this just to—to drag all my other buried sins into the light—”

“Shove your suspicion up your ass, Starscream,” Bumblebee says, rolling his eyes. The tension breaks as easily as his mask had. “I just conjunxed you with all of Cybertron as my witness. You think I did that because I had _ulterior motives_?”

Starscream stops, straightening, before dropping his gaze. “I didn’t think—well, you know it, it wasn’t real,” he says, as uncertain as Windblade has ever seen him, and she can’t help but wonder if Bumblebee has this disarming effect on everyone. Brave, cheerful Bumblebee, who was certainly less cheerful than he once was. Watching him move towards Starscream, she thinks he must still be just as brave

“It was real to me,” Bumblebee says, finally closing the gap between them to take Starscream’s hand, to pull the broken mask away and let it fall. “If you want it to be.”

Windblade turns away for a second, almost unable to process the raw emotions strung between the two of them like strands of fairy lights. She hears the sound of a single kiss, a light brush of metal, before Starscream coughs significantly.

“Well,” he says, aiming for dignified but barely managing to land on the right side of ruffled. Windblade sees him squeeze Bumblebee’s hand once, briefly, before letting it go. “Don’t think you’ve going to be able to use ‘but we’re conjunxed’ to win every argument, Bee.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Bee laughs, arms crossed over his chest. His smile, too, has a hint of relief. 

“And I’m still not waking up just to sit in jail,” Starscream says, both of them turning to Windblade. “We need a plan, First Delegate. I’m assuming you have one?”

\-----

Windblade waits in the cold, fluorescent light of Fixit’s clinic, her hands clasped in her lap to stop them from fidgeting. Wheeljack and Fixit are still fussing over the last pieces of what looks uncomfortably like Bumblebee’s corpse.

“Ain’t natural,” Ironhide says, wringing his hands together hard enough to scrape the paint. “You’re sure about this, Windblade? You’re sure it was him?”

The optics of Bumblebee’s body are dark black panes of glass. On the circuit bed next to the new body, Starscream is almost unchanged from the first time she saw him here, looking almost—almost—as much like an empty body himself.

“I’m sure, Ironhide,” she says, and she reaches out to lay her palm over his twisting hands. 

He quiets. The weight of his trust is crushing, sometimes. It bends her spine. “Just don’t get it, that’s all,” he grumbles at last, when Wheeljack and Fixit step away and the soft pulse of the sparkbeat monitor is the only sound in the room. “Why would Starscream risk his neck to save Bee? To almost die holding onto his spark? Starscream’s the most self-centered opportunist in the galaxy.”

Windblade looks up at him and smiles. “If anyone could convince him,” she suggests.

“It’s Bumblebee,” Ironhide agrees with a grudging nod. “Damn, well. I can’t say I’m happy about Screamer’s leash getting cut for this, and part of me thinks he might’ve still planned it, but—well. I’d give almost anything to have Bee back, and I think this is out of even _Screamer’s_ ability to plan.” 

With one last sigh, Ironhide stands up and claps his hands together. “Y’all ready to get this show on the road?” he asks. Fixit nods as he holds out one end of a cortical psychic patch, and Wheeljack moves towards Starscream with the other.

It is a tense few minutes, with power crackling along the cord from one broken body to the next, before one of them moves. Bumblebee’s chest rises into the air a few inches, then a few feet, as his fans kick on and his optics and biolights run through their start-up sequences. His vocalizer spews a burst of static once, twice, and his hand moves over his chest as if relearning how to play an instrument. Ironhide moves toward him immediately as Bumblebee tries to sit, keeping up a steady stream of reassurances.

“Starscream,” Bumblebee says at last, words still rife with static as he struggles out from beneath Ironhide’s arms. His eyes lock onto Starscream’s body at once, and Bumblebee’s whole body leans towards it like a golden daisy turning towards the sun. Ironhide lets him go in shock, eyes wide and mouth open. Bumblebee stumbles over to Starscream’s circuit bed, putting one knee up as he holds onto Starscream’s shoulders, his hands shaking and his blue eyes intent. 

“Please,” Windblade hears him say, faint but audible in the hush of the room. “Please, please. Don’t you leave me, too—you promised.”

The sparkbeat monitor attached to Starscream’s bed pulses erratically before dropping to a flat line, broken only by mole hills instead of mountains. Fixit leaps up, jumpstart cables in his hand. “Bumblebee, I know you’re confused, but you have to _move_. He’s not going to make it, I have to—”

Bumblebee put his hands at the upper rim of Starscream’s cockpit and opens Starscream’s spark casing with two deft movements. Within, Windblade can see the spark sputtering as it dies. Bumblebee’s thumbs stroke the rim of the casing as he stares down into Starscream’s dim, darkening optics.

“Please, Starscream. Let me in. _Come back to me_ ,” he begs, and he opens his own spark chamber with a rush of light.

Windblade can barely hear Fixit shouting over the crush of energy that erupts in the room as Bumblebee leans down to connect their sparks together. The world is awash with blue and blue and blue, so bright and warm that Windblade can’t help but think that this is what the power of matrix must feel like. At last, the light dies down. Windblade watches Bumblebee close his spark chamber, resting with his forehead on Starscream’s, and Windblade can see his faith as fast and deep as ocean running through him.

Faintly, then more clearly, Starscream’s eyes brighten: embers stoked into wild red flames.

Laughing with relief, Bumblebee takes Starscream’s face in his hands and bends down to kiss him on the forehead, on the ridge above each eye; once, softly, on his mouth. “I love you,” Bumblebee says, joy spilling into the room as powerfully as his spark had.

“Then you’re a fool,” Starscream says, smiling, and he leans up into a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> For the curious, the council allows Starscream to trade his imprisonment for banishment. He goes to Earth, where he stays at the Cybertronian embassy with his conjunx endura (who happens to be the Cybertronian ambassador to Earth, naturally). Keep an eye out for that fic! I have a bad habit of writing self-indulgent PWP epilogues.
> 
> As always, all comments & feedback loved.
> 
> Find me on Twitter at @chelthulu to scream about StarBee with me.


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